Rebuild box for TW2?

May 24th, 2011, 12:51

I don't remember when I've last seen a game as nearly unanimously praised as this one. Given that I loved the bejeezus out of The Witcher, I'm seriously tempted to get back to cRPG's with this one, after a hiatus of more than a year and a half.

But my rig is hopelessly out of date. I've also not paid any attention whatsoever to developments in hardware. I have a vague idea that something called an i5 and an i7 has come out in the meantime, and an i7 is supposed to be better, and that all the kool kids run kuad-kores these days, but beyond that, zip.

And I really don't feel like doing the research.

So, suppose a grizzled old fogey wants to do one final upgrade to his gaming rig, with a budget fork around $500–1000/400-800€, for the CPU, mobo, RAM, and VGA (keeping the rest: box, PSU, OS, disks etc.). What would you recommend? I would want something that does justice to the game at High detail; it deserves that much at least.

It's very CPU dependent, so you definitely want a fast one. In my experience, there's no need for the absolute top-end, as they're prohibitively expensive and will show only minimal benefit with the vast majority of games.

I have an i7-950 (IIRC) - and it handles TW2 very admirably. However, I really don't follow the CPU market, and I'm sure there are better CPUs out there today.

These days, I'd recommend at least 6GB of fast memory. Since it's relatively cheap, there's no need to make do with less. There are many speeds - and the higher the better, really. Make sure the mobo supports the speed, though.

As for video cards - you need to decide if you want to splurge or not.

If you just want to play TW2 comfortably, without consideration for the future - something like an ATI 5850/5870 would be quite sufficient. The comparable Nvidia card would probably be something like 480. Faster and more expensive cards like Nvidia 580 wouldn't make that much difference today.

Sadly i7 is not necessarily faster than i5 - this gen i5 is faster than last gen i7, and this gen i7 is not really any faster than this gen i5. Intel haven't been helpful.

That said, this would be my build for TW2.. as in fact it's what I'm just buying for that express purpose for my wife.

CPU - THE most important thing for TW2 performance, so I've concentrated on this: Intel Core i5 2500K
RAM: 2x2GB corsair vengence 1600DDR3 1.5v (4GB is still more than sufficient)
GPU: nVidia 560 (non-ti) 1gb. (GPU is not as important for TW2, and there doesn't seem to be any particular favouritism towards a vendor for this game, but another game she plays prefers nvidia. If you play things like crysis then go for an ATI 5870 instead, it's faster)
Motherboard: Any p67. I picked the Asus p8p67 (non-LE).

Should be able to play ultra, which I'm not sure an AMD solution can at the moment. However new chips are coming from AMD which might be worth a look at for a similar level of performance to the above.

Originally Posted by kalniel
Should be able to play ultra, which I'm not sure an AMD solution can at the moment. However new chips are coming from AMD which might be worth a look at for a similar level of performance to the above.

Not to get into an AMD vs Intel debate, but I play on max w/out ubersampling just fine on my Phenom 965 + ATI 5870. I only get 15-20 fps with ubersampling turned on but I've read posts about people with i7's also struggling.

DArtagnan

Originally Posted by Drithius
Not to get into an AMD vs Intel debate, but I play on max w/out ubersampling just fine on my Phenom 965 + ATI 5870. I only get 15-20 fps with ubersampling turned on but I've read posts about people with i7's also struggling.

I'm running a Phenom 965 + Geforce GTX 470 OC, and I also play with everything on, except ubersampling and motion blur. I turn off motion blur simply because I find it annoying. I use the "high" preset, but with some of the individual effects turned up even higher, and anistropic filtering at x16.

Runs pretty smooth for me at those settings at 1920x1200 with vsync on. I do get a slight pause when I enter the map and meditation screens, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the graphics level.

The Witcher 2 maybe very CPU dependent but even with my 2 year old AMD 955 BE I'm not even near full use on any of the four cores. The reason I choose AMD in my previous post is that is is cheaper than Intel and can get a comparable performance in low to medium performance levels.

Originally Posted by Drithius
Not to get into an AMD vs Intel debate, but I play on max w/out ubersampling just fine on my Phenom 965 + ATI 5870. I only get 15-20 fps with ubersampling turned on but I've read posts about people with i7's also struggling.

That's good to hear. I don't have any leaning towards AMD or Intel as companies - my last computer was an X2 based system - I just wasn't convinced by their competitiveness this round. Looking forward to bulldozer though as mentioned.

Originally Posted by Prime Junta
BTW, does the 1600 MHz RAM make any difference over 1066 MHz — the price difference was about 20 € so I kinda thought might as well.

(

Unless you are trying to built a extreme high end / overclocker rig the ram speed barley matters. It is measurable but do yourself a favor and put the 20€ aside and save for a SSD. That'll help much more.

Edit: The stuff you choose is more than ok.

Edit2: And it really is more expensive than in Germany. Here I would pay 474€ for all the stuff you listed. Interesting.

Yeah, I have an SSD on my main computer (MacBook Pro) and it rules. Definitely worth it for something I use a lot every day. But I've got a pair of Velociraptors in the big box, and they're not too bad either, especially when RAIDed.

Guess I'll save that 20 then.

I just noticed that I picked the overclocked 560Ti, which is 20 € more than the standard one. Worth it?

(Your VAT is 4% less than ours, which accounts for a part of the price diff, by the way.)

Anyway, they seem to like the ATI Radeon 6950 more than the GeForce 650Ti. It comes in at 20 € more than the 560Ti OC (900 MHz). Worth it? There does seem to be a consistent difference in the test scores, but not that huge, on the order of 10-15% or so.

Originally Posted by Prime Junta
Okay, here I go again, reading Tom's Hardware. Should stay away from that place.

Anyway, they seem to like the ATI Radeon 6950 more than the GeForce 650Ti. It comes in at 20 € more than the 560Ti OC (900 MHz). Worth it? There does seem to be a consistent difference in the test scores, but not that huge, on the order of 10-15% or so.

Looking at a price range of about 510-550€ now, depending on the GPU.

That's honestly a question of personal preference. nVidia GPUs have PhysX integrated (some games use it), ATI has Eyefinity, etc. I chose my card (Gainward 560 Ti Phantom) based on the fact the the Gainward cooler/fan is far superior to the basic one (way more silent) and because the card slightly overclocked (though that shouldn't matter that much).

I always buy the card with the best performance/price level and upgrade when needed (DX11 and a full HDMI port where my reasons for upgrading a few month ago).

Just setting up the box. I was cheap and didn't upgrade to Win 7, so I've got updates up the wazoo, since I'm installing from the original Vista media. Other than that, so far so good.

Bought the Nordic edition boxed set -- a bit cheaper than GOG, and it came with all kinds of cute stuff, like a game guide, a coin, maps, and even paper dolls. It'd be pretty sweet even for a collector's edition, let alone for a normal price. You can tell the folks making this had fun doing it. Total nerdgasm.